James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Colossal Biosciences has generated a flurry of headlines in recent years, as the ‘de-extinction’ company announced plans to resurrect the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and, most recently, the dodo bird, developing a bioengineering toolkit along the way that has prompted investment from outfits like In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm. Colossal has also acquired a stellar lineup of geneticists, including leading paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro, to help it in its quest to see these proxies of extinct species walk the Earth.

Last month, Shapiro—author of How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (2015) and Life As We Made It (2021)—leveled up her involvement with the company from an advisory capacity to its chief science officer.

While an exact version of an extinct animal cannot be created, scientists hope they can (to paraphrase the line from Moneyball) recreate the creatures in the aggregate. That means endowing Asian elephants with the long hair and cold resistance of a mammoth, and making facsimile dodos spring forth from chicken eggs. Just last month, Colossal said it had engineered elephant stem cells that can be converted into an embryonic state, a big step toward its beyond-elephantine goal. In April, the company said it would give $7.5 million in 2024 to academic institutions undertaking ancient DNA research.

Shapiro recently spoke with Gizmodo about Colossal’s goals and her new role at the company. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Isaac Schultz, Gizmodo: Things are moving so fast. When we last spoke, the dodo project had not even been announced. There was this open question of, well, how do you even go about de-extinction with birds? Colossal CEO Ben Lamm recently said that he thinks it’s more likely that we’ll have a dodo before a mammoth, just due to the artificial womb issue.

Beth Shapiro, Colossal: Artificial womb technology seems pretty hard. But that is so cool. Like, the ability to try to figure out the placental interface and really understand some really foundational biology is exciting to me. I mean, that’s a field that I’ve never imagined that I would be in. And then, when I look at that team that’s working on the artificial womb, it’s engineers and developmental biologists and people who really care about trying to figure this out. It’s impressive. But yes, that’s probably a long time frame. The timing of a different species really varies. For every species that’s a candidate for de-extinction, there are different technical and ethical, and ecological challenges associated with them. If we’re just focusing on the technology to get us to a gene-edited embryo, there are different hurdles with birds, as you say.

.

Beth Shapiro

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Hi, Liz! 🙂 How are you feeling?” an incoming text pings.

I click on a pre-generated answer. “Okay, I guess. . .” I’m in the home stretch of a long work trip, and I’ve been stressing about spending time away from my kids.

“If you were to describe your current mood, what kind of an ‘okay’ are you feeling right now?”

“Anxious,” I type.

“I’m here to help you feel more in control,” the bot replies. Nanoseconds later, a meme-ified cartoon gif blinks into the text window: “Don’t let the little worries bring you down.”

This automated exchange launches my dialogue with Wysa, an AI therapy chatbot that now lives in my computer. In leaning on a bot to shore up my mental health, I’m joining the 22 percent of American adults who’ve already done the same—a movement rooted in a dire shortage of trained providers and the recent availability of fast, low-cost online AI tools. Most therapists are perpetually slammed, in part due to the pandemic-era surge in demand for mental healthcare. “Everybody’s full. Everybody‘s busy. Everybody’s referring out,” says Santa Clara University psychologist and ethicist Thomas Plante. “There’s a need out there, no question about it.”

With the demand for care outpacing supply, mental health support bots have begun to fill the gap. Wysa, launched in 2016, was among the first. Since then, hundreds of viable competitors, including Woebot and Youper, have been broadly deployed in a marketplace that imposes few restrictions on them.

Standard AI therapy bots don’t require approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as long as they don’t claim to replace human therapists. In 2020 the agency also relaxed enforcement procedures for “digital therapeutics” in hopes of stemming the pandemic-related psychiatric crisis, clearing the way for developers to launch popular products claiming mental health benefits. Woebot alone has exchanged messages with more than 1.5 million users to date, according to CEO Michael Evers. Wysa is being used in the United Kingdom to triage those seeking appointments and to offer support to people while they wait to be matched with a therapist. Aetna International is now offering the app for free to members in the United States and elsewhere.

My experiences with Wysa and Woebot mirror the analysis of experts like Plante, who view the rise of AI chatbots with a mixture of optimism and concern. Many of the bots incorporate well-established principles of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which aims to overcome distortions in thinking and help people correct self-sabotaging behaviors. It’s easy, I found, to think of the bots as rational or sentient, making even simple advice feel authoritative. Interacting with a chatbot can also give users the sense they’re being heard without judgment, says Chaitali Sinha, Wysa’s senior vice president of healthcare and clinical development. “It’s such a powerful experience for people who have never had the opportunity to experience that,” she says.

.

da-kuk/Gettyimages

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-therapy-bots-have-risks-and-benefits-and-more-risks/

.

__________________________________________

.

This is interesting…

.

New Living Translation

3 If the Good News we preach is hidden behind a veil, it is hidden only from people who are perishing. 4 Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They don’t understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God.

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

If you’re like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you’ve spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that’s uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

“There’s actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand,” says Ramesh Balasubramaniam, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. “It has important cognitive benefits.”

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman, draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting’s power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

.

van-balvan/Getty Images/iStockphoto

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Earlier this week, news broke that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., claimed to have once had a dead worm in his brain. Kennedy had been experiencing memory loss and mental fog, and he originally suspected these symptoms might be caused by a brain tumor. Brain scans in 2010 showed a cyst that his doctors said contained remains of a parasite. The findings and other health issues were revealed in a New York Times article based on a review of a deposition for his 2012 divorce, as well as an interview the outlet conducted with him.

The revelation drew attention in the worlds of politics and parasitology. “I woke up to all kinds of messages from friends in parasitology,” says Shira Shafir, an epidemiologist and an associate adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in response to the news.

The species of the purported parasite in Kennedy’s brain was never identified, and he did not know where he got infected. A spokesperson told media outlets on Wednesday that Kennedy had traveled extensively to Africa, South America, and Asia and likely contracted the parasite on one of the trips. Several parasites can affect the central nervous system and potentially create cysts in brain tissue. While relatively uncommon in the U.S., such infections can be devastating in many parts of the world. For example, the World Health Organization estimates there are between 2.56 million and 8.3 million people around the globe living with neurocysticercosis, a brain infection caused by the pork tapeworm Taenia solium. “It’s a really big deal in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, India, and other parts of Asia. It’s a leading cause of acquired seizures,” says Clinton White, a parasitologist and infectious diseases professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “Neurocysticercosis is a major disease, and it’s kind of funny [these are] the circumstances in which people are paying attention to it.”

Scientific American spoke with Shafir and White to discuss how parasitic worms may infect the brain, what symptoms they cause, and how infections are diagnosed and treated.

What are parasitic worms, and which ones can infect the brain?

SHAFIR: We generally don’t have adult worms that end up in the brain. What does end up in the brain are parasites in their earlier developmental stages, such as eggs or larvae—or, for lack of a better word, baby worms. So generally the parasitic infections that can impact the brain are those of pathogens in early developmental stages, which, for the most part, accidentally make it into the brain.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________